Bondi Hipsters become Soul Mates in new time-travel show

David Dale

Christiaan Van Vuuren has to admit he was getting a bit sick of the Bondi Hipsters: "Yeah, I can't watch more than 10 minutes of them. I got really bored of watching these guys just talking shit on a couch, because I go 'There's nothing happening, they're just talking and talking'."

The pretentious pair he created in 2011 with his brother Connor and their friend Nick Boshier, which turned into an online cult phenomenon, had just about reached their limit as a vehicle for satirising what he calls "the cyclical selfish nature of young people who complain the government is not doing anything to help the environment, while they are puffing on cigarettes and driving a Jeep Wrangler, who are really socially conscious unless it touches their life in some way."

That's why the trio decided to expand their efforts into the rather odd comedy series Soul Mates, which starts on Thursday on ABC2.Our hipster friends Dom and Adrian make their move from YouTube but take up only a quarter of the airtime in the series.

It's when Van Vuuren explains the other three pairs who weave into the narrative of Soul Mates that the full strangeness of the project emerges. Imagine pitching this idea for a comedy show to a commercial network: "It's about two best friends who are connected as souls, so they find themselves in different incarnations throughout their different lifetimes. This connection, that they've lived together before, is totally unbeknownst to them.

"In the beginning of time, they are two cavemen, who are trying to figure stuff out for the first time, get their heads around what's acceptable to do and what's not, and just basically trying to stay alive. These guys look at the world like children would, and have no social implications about doing things in a particular way. One of them is like a bogan, and the other is a bit more thoughtful.

"Then in the 1980s, they are two New Zealand cops who are sent over to Australia to defend New Zealand's international interests as a couple of Kiwi assassins. In one of their missions, they get tasked with trying to convince a young Russell Crowe to go back to New Zealand because one day, when he's a famous actor, Australians are going to try and claim him.

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"This allows us to satirise '80s action movies and also the kind of big brother/ little brother syndrome that Australia and New Zealand have. We do speak with New Zealand accents, that's very important.

"Then in the future, they are two guys who work in a time-travel agency when time travel is as accessible as going into a flight centre and booking a trip overseas. In this future, white males are in a minority. This allows us to play with all the time-travel conundrums, all the loopholes that become confusing. It also lets us explore this idea of a future that's feminised, where women have been empowered."

And the fourth duo in the story are the present-day hipsters Dom and Adrian. If he was getting tired of them, why didn't Van Vuuren dump them? "Because we can take the piss out of anything that is a modern, current or youthful pursuit, like music, fashion, acting, conspiracy theories. We keep going with those guys until people stop watching and interacting," he says. "Our Facebook page is ever increasingly more active, the videos are getting more and more hits. Finally in Soul Mates we get to take these guys on a trajectory out in the real world, trying to launch this fashion label. That was fun for us to do and it's definitely reinvigorated my enjoyment of the characters."

Surely it can't be that the Van Vuuren brothers are developing a serious social purpose? "Well, there's still a lot of dick jokes, but this is the first time we've had a proper budget to play with and the first time we've had the time to get deep in the writing. We wanted to make something where the jokes had reasons to be there. We want to say something here and there, without being too righteous, when we have the chance to."

Rich pickings: Jason Dundas says his new reality game-show,The Big Adventure, has had a lot of money thrown at it

This column was happy to give Jason Dundas the opportunity to practise his answer to the question he's going to be asked a hundred times about his new reality game-show The Big Adventure: how is it not just a remake of Survivor?

It is, after all, about 12 exhibitionists plotting, bitching and competing through a series of challenges on a desert island until one emerges with prize money of a million dollars.

This was Dundas's first go at an answer, during which you'll note that he does not ever name the show's obvious inspiration: "Look, I think that other show was great for its time. I think this show combines elements of the most successful reality television shows we know. It combines elements of conventional reality television and docudrama, and then it has big elements of competition TV.

"So you're looking at a format that's kind of Reality TV 2.0, combining everything we know and love over the past 10 years and putting it into one jampacked hour. That's how it twists from formats like what you just mentioned."

But Australian Survivor was a flop when it aired in 2002. Why would The Big Adventure succeed when its predecessor failed?

"Things like this, it comes down to budget," Dundas says. "They threw everything at it. It looks a million bucks. Unless you go all in, like these guys at Seven have done, I don't know if you've got the best chance of connecting with the audience."

He's right about the big budget. Seven had a crew of almost 200 people on the South Pacific island filming and feeding the 12 contestants for five weeks, to make just 10 episodes. While the camera operators were capturing every word and gesture, Dundas was Big-Brothering in a makeshift studio.

"We would sit in a hut 100 metres from their base camp with 20 monitors, watching what's going on and cutting together this storyline of reality. I'd arm myself with all this information and go in in the morning knowing exactly what everyone's got on their minds. I could drum up different questions to different people, and provoke different emotions to emerge in the group."

Dundas was shocked by the dark side of human nature that emerged. "I've hosted pop-culture television now for eight or so years and this was my first dive into reality competition TV. Obviously I expected there to be certain people who were looking for popularity or fame and people who would do sort of devilish things, but I've never seen people go behind other people's back so harshly. It was pretty full-on."

And his role as host was to stir up trouble? "My job is to make this show bloody entertaining. If there's drama to be had, we want to make sure people know about it."

The Big Adventure starts on Sunday, October 19 at 6.30pm on Seven.

Accent acute or grave?

We know David Tennant can do a variety of British accents, but apparently he reached his linguistic limit when he tried to cross the Atlantic. His natural sound is Scottish (and his real name is McDonald), but the first time most viewers encountered him was in Doctor Who, where he faked a convincing London tone. Then in Hamlet and Spies of Warsaw, he sounded like an upper-class Oxford don.

He was finally allowed to use his own voice in the hit British crime series Broadchurch (shown here on ABC), but when that was remade as Gracepoint for US audiences, he was required to sound American.

The reaction there has not been positive, with the kindest commentators saying he sounds more Canadian than Californian, cloaked with a Dark Knight growl. To this column's ear, he sounds Irish. Tennant told Variety magazine he was aware of the problem: "I worked with a lot of really talented dialect coaches. Obviously there are certainly a lot of technical sounds to master… But you have to find out how it sits in your bones so that you're not doing a silly voice and it becomes sort of organic to you. It's also just having an ear for it in the first place so that when you're practising it, it just becomes second nature."

Tennant says his dialect coach had been complaining that "some of my 'abouts' and 'beens' are all going a bit wrong".

At the same time, nobody is complaining about the American accent of our own Jacki Weaver, who plays a bad-tempered old lady in Gracepoint. Growing up as a viewer of Australian television, Weaver would have had more experience of American accents than Tennant.

Gracepoint airs on Sunday, October 19, at 7.30pm on the pay channel Universal. If you don't have pay TV, you can sample Tennant's performances on YouTube.